You’ll have had the same conversation yourself. It will have started with some innocuous banter between friends. Then someone will have mentioned Facebook and, from there, you’ll have been talking about viral videos, footage of natural disasters and images you’d rather not see. Before you know it – and after a few glasses of wine – you’ll have been tearing into each other about refugees, Isis executions and babies on beaches. That’s the form of Vanishing Point’s fascinating production, which takes us from improvised coffee-table chit-chat to a vision of biblical deluge in a few troublingly short steps.

An initial provocation by actor Barnaby Power is met by an anti-capitalist polemic by Pauline Goldsmith and countered with a fuzzy-edged humanitarian plea by Elicia Daly. Each time the conversational circle spins round, the tone grows darker, the barbs more personal and the deep rumbling of Mark Melville’s score more sinister.

Why do plays about sex and violence written by women still shock?

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The starting point for director Matthew Lenton was 1978’s The Destroyed Room, an image by photographer Jeff Wall in which a bedroom has been inexplicably torn apart. That in turn was inspired by The Death of Sardanapalus, a 19th-century painting by Eugène Delacroix in which a besieged king looks on impassively after ordering the death of his concubines. The implicit connection is to do with our role as observers. If we are drawn to distressing images – a man committing suicide, a drowning asylum seeker, a captive set on fire – does that show our capacity for empathy or does it make us callous voyeurs?

It’s a theme reflected in the debate around Katie Mitchell’s National Theatre revival of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, with its portrayal of tongue-cutting brutality. It was also an issue in Vanishing Point’s 2012 show Wonderland, with its dark contemplation of pornography.

Throw in the urgent concerns of a world fleeing from conflict, as explored in designer Kai Fischer’s award-winning Last Dream (On Earth), and you have a vexing dichotomy. The footage that could be raising our level of political engagement is often the stuff of grisly home entertainment. And do such images play more on our capacity for empathy than action? We look, we feel, then click on a cat gif.

Ironically, The Destroyed Room is prey to the same problem. As the waters rise and the curtains rip on Fischer’s set, we are sunk into a mood of apocalyptic despair. The show is provocative, compelling and visually daring, but having complained about fiddling while Rome burns, it offers nothing to put out the flames.